The sociocultural model in and of itself was not an original idea. It traced back at least as far as the argument set out by Thomas Aquinas seven hundred years ago to the effect that the two seminal and ineradicable loves of any individual human being are the love of God and the love of one’s native country; and, further, that these can live and flourish only within the framework of a religious nationalism.
The greatest significance of Solidarity, therefore, was to be its function as a modern laboratory of sociocultural liberty rooted entirely and sufficiently in religious nationalism. If it was totally successful, it would be an important new ingredient introduced into the dough of international affairs that would produce a slow leavening of the materialist mind dominating East and West alike.
Even without total success, however, Solidarity would be an unbloody battleground for a choice John Paul was certain would have to be made. A choice, on the one hand, for the sociocultural religious nationalism vindicated in Poland by the Pontiff’s mentor, Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, and championed in the Soviet Union itself first by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and more recently by Igor Shafarevich. Or, conversely, a choice for the opposing sociopolitical model personified in the Soviet Union mainly by Andrei Sakharov and in Poland by the two well-known activists Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron: a model totally based on the Western ideal of democratic egalitarianism.
To some degree, then, Solidarity was the first international arena in which John Paul’s early idea—his early vision, if you will, of religious nationalism as the vehicle for sociocultural freedom—made its debut in the hostile territory of the Soviet Union, and at the same time went head-to-head with the basic premise of the capitalist superpower.
Solidarity alone would not do the trick, of course. The melting of the Soviet iceberg of materialist, anti-Church and anti-God intransigence would, as John Paul saw the matter in 1979, be an intricate affair of papal policy that he would begin. But it would continue into another pontificate after he himself had joined his predecessors in the papal crypt beneath the altar of St. Peter’s Basilica.
While time was thus not the primary factor for the Pope in those early years of his reign, still he wasted not a moment in setting the broader lines of his new policy with respect to the USSR. And the manner in which he proceeded was instructive concerning his whole approach to Vatican politics.
The policy toward the Soviet Union initiated in 1959–60 by Pope John XXIII, and subsequently elaborated from 1963 to 1978 into the wellknown Ostpolitik of the Vatican under Pope Paul VI, presented a practical problem for John Paul. For, at its heart, it was the same policy of containment that the Western powers had adopted toward the USSR of Joseph Stalin in the forties and that they had followed ever since. Its essence was to contain Soviet aggression; to react to Soviet moves; and to wait for some favorable evolution within the Soviet system.
Whatever the results of such an Ostpolitik for capitalist democracy, it was a barren policy for religion and for the Church. It promised only silent martyrdom amid the slow erosion of all religious tradition by the steady pressures of a professional antireligion. It was a seemingly perpetual tunnel with no light at the end, filled merely with the ever-encroaching darkness of spreading godlessness.
Nonetheless, Pope John Paul made it clear that he would not abrogate the policies of his predecessors. Practically speaking, it would have been difficult and even counterproductive to do so in any case, for diplomatic protocols with some Eastern European countries had already been signed, and others were in train.
The solution for John Paul lay in the fact that there was nothing in the Vatican’s Ostpolitik, and nothing in the Vatican protocols, to keep him from attempting an end run around the Soviet Party-State. In precisely such a move, the new Holy Father set about building closer and ever closer ties with the Russian Orthodox Church and with Eastern Orthodoxy in general.
This papal end run included certain overt moves—John Paul visited the Greek Orthodox center in Istanbul, for example; and he received and openly favored visits to the Vatican by Orthodox prelates. But there were also constant covert moves originating in Poland and radiating into western parts of the USSR, moves that fostered a common religious bond between Eastern European Roman Catholics and Russian Orthodox communities.
Later historians with access to records unavailable today will document the successes of John Paul’s end-run policies and their basic premise. Suffice it to say now that, in spite of the official prostitution of the Russian Orthodox Church to the ideological policies of the Party-State, John Paul’s efforts nourished within that Church a genuinely Christian core of prelates and people eager once and for all to reenter the mainstream of European Christianity as vindicated by papal Rome; and eager as well to renounce the role, accepted once upon a time by Russian Orthodox Church authorities, as servants of the Soviet Party-State in the fomentation of worldwide revolution.
By the opening of the eighties, about half of the Orthodox prelates were already secretly prepared, if the opportunity were afforded, to place themselves under the ecclesial unity of the Roman Pope. A sociocultural leavening had been produced within the Russian Orthodox Church. While the Vatican’s official Ostpolitik remained undisturbed, a deep cultural change was being effected covertly within the body of Russian Orthodox believers that could lead in the long run—as all deep cultural changes do—to sociopolitical change.
Yet another factor the Pope reckoned as working for his new policy of stirring up change in the Soviet Union was the information revolution taking place worldwide. Launched in the West, and already producing a global invasion of practical knowledge into the business of international linkage and development, this was not a factor under John Paul’s control. But it could only work hand in glove with the sociocultural change so essential for his stategy in the Soviet Union. For the information revolution would inevitably mean the dawning of the factual truth about things on the minds of Soviet citizens. Factual truth about past history, for one thing; and about present economic and social conditions in the world. The kind of truth that would help free those citizens from the darksome toils of the Big Lie foisted on them by the Party-State.
John Paul achieved some remarkable successes in the dynamic pursuit of his independent policies to sow the seeds of sociocultural change in the geopolitical soil of the East. Indeed, his assault on the Soviet monolith was key to the 1989 liberation of the Eastern European states. And by 1990—almost overnight, as it seemed to the inattentive—whole blocs of Russian believers voted themselves and their church property back into the Roman Catholic fold.
Nevertheless, this was not a pope for halfhearted ventures, nor for half an international policy. His end run around Soviet officialdom was not a religious gambit, but a geopolitical strategy, and it was therefore joined to a twin policy toward the West. His concern, in other words, was not only to produce a change in the policies of what Cardinal Wyszynski had always called the Red Internationale of the USSR. At least as much of his attention, and a great deal more of his physical energy, was devoted to a change in the increasingly materialist, antiChurch and anti-God stance of the Golden Internationale of the Western capitalist nations.
It was significant in that regard that the Solidarity experiment with which the Pontiff was so deeply involved in his Polish homeland would quickly fire the popular imagination, and the deep concern of all truly democratic minds, in the Western nations. But the deepest and broadest effects of John Paul’s policies were produced in the West as a direct consequence of his crisscrossing lines of world travel. By those travels he achieved a high international profile; he made his ideas current coinage among world leaders; and in countries that were battlegrounds between East and West, he was able to juxtapose those ideas persuasively with Leninist-Marxist ideas. Within a brief time, it became so clear that Pope John Paul had taken his due place among the nations’ leaders that—after over a hundred years of an attitude that passed for a policy, an attitude regarded by some as “Hands off this p
olitical hot potato”—even the United States reestablished formal diplomatic relations between Washington and the Vatican.
At the same time he was making such geopolitical headway, however—and despite urgent advice from some of his most trusted and certainly his most loyal advisers, as well as a mounting cry of anguish from ordinary believers who were subjected to extraordinary displays of un-Catholicity among bishops, clergy and religious around the world—the Pontiff neglected almost totally what many argued was his primary problem and responsibility. He put off indefinitely any attempt to reform his own Church, or even to arrest the accelerating deterioration of its universal integrity.
The surprising thing was that this was not negligence in office occasioned by the heat of his geopolitical agenda. As in the case of his choice not to abrogate the Vatican’s formal Ostpolitik, it was a conscious decision on the Pontiff’s part. As early as 1980, in fact, John Paul was frank in declaring that a reform of his rapidly deteriorating Church—or even an attempt to arrest that deterioration—was an impossibility at that stage of his pontificate. In his gradation of papal values, the geopolitics of power took precedence over the geopolitics of faith. Reform of his churchly institution would he vehicled on the global change he was pursuing with such intelligence and vigor.
That was essentially the agenda and the climate in Pope John Paul II’s Vatican for the first two and a half years of his pontificate. As revolutionary as his geopolitical vision was, it was keyed to and gridded upon nothing more astounding than an educated understanding of human affairs. Like the Wise Men of the West, in a certain sense he took time for granted. He remained comfortable in the persuasion that the shift from the old internationalism to a more truly geopolitical globalism would be a gradual affair: that it would come on the long finger of slow and laborious historical changes. He presumed that as the gradual changes he was sowing within the geopolitics of power would bear more and more fruit, so too the preeminence of the geopolitics of faith would emerge.
Nothing short of the rudest shock of ultimate reality—of life and death and the inescapable will of God—would change that mind-set.
At a certain moment on May 15, 1981, during an open-air papal audience in St. Peter’s Square, in the presence of some 75,000 people and before the eyes of an estimated 11 million television viewers, Pope John Paul spied a little girl wearing a small picture of Christ’s mother as Our Lady of Fatima. Just as he bent from his slow-moving “popemobile” in a spontaneous gesture toward the child, hired assassin Mehmet Ali Agea squeezed off two bullets, aimed precisely where his head had been. As two pilgrims fell wounded to the ground, two more shots rang out, and this time John Paul’s blood stained his white papal cassock.
Robust though he was, it took six months of painful convalescence for the Pope to recover. During that time he had the strength and the nobility of soul to receive in private audience the sorrowing mother of his Turkish assassin-designate. Motivated by the love of Christ, and by that ancient principle of powerful men to “know thine enemy,” he also went to see Ali Agca in his prison cell. In quasi-confessional intimacy, John Paul talked with the man who knew the enemy who had commissioned so grisly a desecration.
The attempted assassination of John Paul shocked the world as a planned act of high sacrilege. In its immediate intent, however, that most vile act had no religious significance. For it was an act committed against the Pope not as a religious leader but as a geopolitician well along on the highroad of success. The wrath that had boiled up in homicidal anger, and that by the remotest and most covert control had guided the actions of Ali Agea on that day, was the wrath of important hegemonic interests separated from St. Peter’s Square by huge distances of land and water. Interests unwilling to see this Pope reintroduce the Holy See as an independent and uncontrollable force in international affairs.
Already John Paul’s successes in Poland had jiggered alliances presumed to have been inviolable. As he had widened the ambit of his attention and his energies, he had consistently shown himself to be a leader capable of carrying out his intention to shape events, and to determine the success or failure of secular policies for the new world order. He had not opened the new game of nations by chance, as some had originally thought. He was not some papal Alice who had carelessly fallen down a geopolitical rabbit hole and then wondered where he had landed. He was a purposeful contender for power, who cast a shadow that already blocked the light of success from the eyes of some with diametrically opposed plans for the geopolitical future of the society of nations. Better, then, to cut that shadow down to the abject shades of death in the noonday glare of the Italian sun.
Given the fact that the attempt to murder him was itself a badge of his geopolitical success, there was no earthly reason to expect John Paul to change his vision of the new world order or his agenda to influence it. It was not lost on him, however, that the attempt on his life had taken place on May 13. Or that a series of very curious supernatural events—events of intimate interest to the papacy—had begun on May 13, 1917, in the obscure Portuguese hamlet of Fatima, and had ended there on October 13 of the same year with a miracle centered on the Virgin Mary and her apparent power to control the sun in spectacular ways. Nor, finally, was it lost on him that, but for the picture of the Virgin of Fatima pinned to the blouse of a little girl, his skull would have been shattered by the first bullets out of Ali Agca’s gun.
Given such circumstances, it would have been a stony papal heart indeed that could have refused to reexamine the compelling events that had taken place at Fatima over five months, from spring to fall, in 1917.
Like most Catholics the world over, Karol Wojtyla had been acquainted for as long as he could remember with most of the facts about Fatima. The Virgin Mary had appeared several times to three peasant children; she had confided to them certain admonitions and instructions, including a detailed set of instructions and predictions that were intended for papal action at a certain time in the future; and she had ended her visits in October with a miracle that recalled for many the Bible verse that tells of a “Woman Clothed with the Sun, and giving birth to a Son who will rule the Nations with a scepter of iron.”
Once elected Pope in 1978, John Paul had become privy to the papal instructions and predictions Mary had entrusted in confidence to the children at Fatima. That part of her message dealt with matters of tribulation for the Roman Catholic institutional organization, and with the troubled future of mankind in general.
Like his two predecessors, John XXIII and Paul VI, Pope John Paul had long since accepted the authenticity of the Fatima events of 1917. In fact, he had been rooted and reared in a certain special intimacy Poles have always cultivated with Mary as the mother of God; and his papal motto reflected his personal and public dedication to her. Still, as those same predecessors had done, John Paul had always taken the papal instructions and predictions of Fatima as a matter for the future. “This matter,” John XXIII had written of Fatima in 1960, “does not concern Our time.” This matter, Pope John Paul had concluded in 1978, does not concern my pontificate. Based on the facts available, it seemed a legitimate judgment call at the time.
Now, however—after what were arguably the very pointed events that had taken place in St. Peter’s Square; after exhaustive examination of the documents and living witnesses and participants connected with the Fatima events themselves; and after nothing less than a personal communication from Heaven during his long convalescence—John Paul was all but forced to face the full meaning of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski’s familiar maxim that “certain events are willed by the Lord of History, and they shall take place.”
More, he came face-to-face with the realization that, far from pointing to some distant future time, the contents of the now famous Fatima message—and, specifically, the secret contents directed to papal attention—amounted to a geopolitical agenda attached to an immediate timetable.
Gone was the Pope’s agenda in which Central Europe figured as the primary springboar
d for lasting geopolitical change, or as the strategic base from which he could slowly interact with and leaven the policies of East and West alike to satisfy the patient demands of God’s justice. Instead, there was now no doubt in John Paul’s mind that Heaven’s agenda had located the catalyst of geopolitical change in Russia.
Gone, too, was the Pope’s presumed time frame involving a leisurely and relatively peaceful evolution from the traditional system of sovereign and interacting nation-states to a veritable new world order. Instead, there was now no doubt in John Paul’s mind that in Heaven’s agenda, all would be thrown into the cauldron of human judgment gone awry; of human evil sanctioned by men as normal; of unparalleled natural catastrophes, and catastrophes caused by the panic of once regnant power brokers scrambling to retain some semblance of their once secure hegemonies, and for their own very survival.
When Pope John Paul had left the Apostolic Palace to greet and bless the people in St. Peter’s Square that May 13 of 1981, he had done so as the leading practitioner of the geopolitics of power. By the time he took up his full papal schedule again six months later, his entire papal strategy had been raised to the level upon which the “Lord of History” arranges the geopolitics of faith.
This is not to say, however, that he was out of the millennium endgame; or that Fatima had done what Ali Agca’s bullets could not—removed him as a leader to be reckoned with in the contention for power in the new world order.
On the contrary, it would seem that all through history, Heaven’s mandates appear to involve the servants of its designs more deeply and more confidently than ever in the major affairs of the world. In its essence, in fact, Fatima became for John Paul something like the famed Heavenly mandate and guarantee of success proffered to Constantine on the eve of his battle at the Milvian Bridge. Suddenly, Constantine had seen the Sign of the Cross appear in the sky, accompanied by the Latin words In hoc signo vinces. “In this sign you will conquer.” Improbable as it was, Constantine took that sign as anything but unrealistic or unworldly. He took it as a guarantee. With miraculous confidence, he not only conquered at the Milvian Bridge but proceeded to conquer his entire world, transforming it into what became the new civilization of Christianity.
Keys of This Blood Page 5
